Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. —Ernie Pyle, war correspondent Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson(1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (194…
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I’ve always loved, and been comforted by, television, but I have found myself turning to it more and more, as I’m sure many of you have, during the past year. Nothing can make the stresses, exhaustions, or sadnesses of the pandemic go away for good, but television *can* make the days move faster, which is all that we can ask for. Escapism. That’s what I want. Well, actually, what I really want is for my brilliant mother and her amazing close friend (love you, Aunt Chris!) to write and star in a show about two super clever, beautiful, sixty-ish-year-old women who run a PI business together. But if that can’t happen, I want to watch something similar. See, lately, I’ve fou…
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Some people are great at movie trivia. Some know all the U.S. state capitals. Me? I’m a walking encyclopedia of famous authors who have committed crimes. (Yes, I’m as much fun at parties as I sound. Invite me, post-COVID.) This niche interest started when I began reading about the sixteenth-century English poet Christopher “Kit” Marlowe for a college literature class. Usually, the bios of classic British authors are pretty easy to skim: went to Oxford and/or Cambridge, moved to London, published some writing, racked up debts, died eventually. Now, to be fair, all of these facts are also true for Marlowe. But that’s leaving out the good parts. There’s the 1589 arrest for…
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My first encounter with the Russian mob occurred two-and-a-half years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Istanbul. My new husband and I had traveled to Turkey and spent a week in a gloriously historic neighborhood, the Blue Mosque visible from our hotel windows. On our second night, we wandered across Galata Bridge, descended the steps to the waterfront, and chose a restaurant with a perfect view of the Golden Horn. Docked directly in front of this restaurant and sporting the tricolor Russian Federation flag floated a gigantic but peeling cruise ship, the name “Odessa” painted under a red star on its side. A single Russian family occupied nearly every table ins…
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When Taryn Cornick’s sister was killed, she was carrying a book. People don’t usually take books when out on a run, but Beatrice must have planned to stop, perhaps at the Pale Lady, where she was often seen tucked in a corner, reading, a pencil behind her ear. The book in the bag still strapped to Beatrice’s body when Timothy Webber bundled her into the boot of his car was the blockbuster of that year, 2003, a novel about tantalising, epoch‑spanning conspiracies. Beatrice enjoyed those books, perhaps because they were often set in libraries. The Cornick girls loved libraries, most of all the one at Princes Gate, which belonged to their grandfather, James Northover. Beat…
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The fifth-floor hallway was darker than reported, and there was an awkward dogleg near the stairwell that their local recon hadn’t bothered to map; it smelled of garlic, mold, and dry rot even though the hotel was billed as a Byzantine five-star. A milky Mediterranean twilight bled faint from hidden recesses along the ceiling, enough to cast a glow but not overly expose the shadow gliding through the shadows toward its target. A woman, unremarkable, if a little boxy, hip to shoulder. Here on business, you might think, not worth a second look. Black slacks, T-shirt and unstructured blazer, wireless earpiece, and Zero Halliburton briefcase. She approached a doorway with a…
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One morning, not long after my first novel, Finding Jake, was published, I walked my kids to the bus stop. As I stood just outside a pod of my neighbors, watching our kids roll away, one of the dads stepped up to me. Understand, the exchange was nothing but friendly. Conversational, even. But it was the beginning. “We really enjoyed your book,” he said. “Thanks,” I said, my eyes lowering, a little embarrassed by the attention. “Yeah,” he said, staring at me. “It was really cool to read a story with so many familiar details.” I didn’t get it at first. Social interactions have always confused me to some degree. The nuances lost until I have time to think about it. W…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Mick Herron, Slough House (Soho) “Herron has certainly devised the most completely realised espionage universe since that peopled by George Smiley.” –The Times (UK) Ben McPherson, Love and Other Lies (William Morrow) “McPherson dramatically highlights the tensions between Norway’s native and immigrant populations as the plot builds to a devastating conclusion. This powerful, thought-provoking novel deserves a wide readership.” –Publishers Weekly Alex Tresniowski, The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP (Simon & Schuster) “This suspenseful, we…
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Though often described as an island Malta actually comprises three inhabited islands, Malta, Gozo and Comino. Few archipelagos can have been fought over as much—invaded, occupied, bombed and put under siege—than Malta. Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, the Knights of St John, Normans, Aragonese, French, the British and the Nazis. As so often geography is destiny for Malta, sitting at a crossroads in the Mediterranean equidistant between southern Europe and north Africa. The Maltese language reveals its cosmopolitan history—Maltese borrows from Sicilian, Arabic, a little French influence, and a bit of English thrown in too. Now part of the European Unio…
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It’s hard to overstate the anticipation that greeted the impending release of the novel Hannibal in 1999. Fans of its prequel, The Silence of the Lambs, had waited 11 years to find out what would happen next to FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling and cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The publisher ordered a first print run of more than a million copies; the manuscript was kept under tight security, lest anyone leak the fate of one of literature’s most infamous villains. But when the book finally hit stores, and those legions of The Silence of the Lambs fans finally had a chance to see how Harris played out the entwined fates of Lecter and Starling, the coll…
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Okay, everyone, it’s time to rank Prison Escape Movies. What are the parameters? The criteria for this category seem straightforward, but might involve even more hair-splitting than usual, so please read the guidelines, or what we’ll have here is… failure to communicate. First of all, not every movie that features a prison escape or escaped prisoners is a Prison Escape Movie. To be on this list, a movie must centrally feature the escape, both tonally and practically, emphasizing the conditions that create the need for the escape, the process of planning and strategizing the escape, the actual escape, being on the run or pursued or recaptured, and/or a general atmosphere…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) I know it’s only February, but Girl A already looks to be one of biggest books of the year. In this powerful story of trauma, abuse, and long-delayed reckonings, the survivors of horrific family abuse must reconnect after the death of their mother. The siblings are still fractured by the alliances and betrayals of their childhood, and each is damaged—and attempting to heal—in their own way. A bleak and powerful tour-de-force that raises complex questions of responsibility and truth, Girl A is not to be missed. –…
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It’s a difficult time to write police procedurals. Or at least it should be. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police racism and the acquiescence or outright participation by some cops in the attack on the Capitol (and elsewhere turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi extremists) should be a wakeup call: the comforting world of police procedurals, a world that so many of us absolutely love and that some of us enjoy writing within, has been built on a shaky foundation. Add other realities that have too long been with us and have tended to be invisible in many books: individual and systemic sexism and homophobia that has led to far too much sexual harassment and, in s…
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I was born an only child, and to my sorrow remained so. Growing up I longed for a brother or sister, someone I could connect with in a special way. All my life I’ve been searching, but that connection remains a mystery to me, a fascinating puzzle I’ve yet to resolve. Which is why in my novels I try to peel back the layers of the particular closeness between siblings. And yet, as I’ve discovered to my great surprise, many siblings are not close. In fact, a bitter enmity has arisen between them, something that, again, I cannot understand. To me, having a sibling is so precious I can’t fathom how people could throw it away as if it was yesterday’s paper. And, like yesterday…
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Black History Month only lasts for a paltry few weeks, but you can (and should) read Black mystery authors all year long! Here is a month-by-month breakdown of upcoming works, so no one has an excuse to ever plead ignorance again when it comes to diversifying their reading lists. The following list includes a wide variety of subgenres, including cozies, crime fiction, legal thrillers, international thrillers, psychological thrillers, detective novels, historical fiction, romans noirs, urban fiction, and even some YA, because (unsurprisingly) there’s as much variety in crime fiction by Black authors as there is in the genre at large. This list is intended as both a resourc…
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As an undergraduate in the 1980s I took a class on Ernest Hemingway taught by poet Donald Junkins. Late in the semester, Junkins invited a bunch of us over to his house to watch a Hemingway documentary. The video opened with some stock footage of Hemingway: There he was aboard a deep-sea fishing vessel; here alongside a trophy animal; there with a bottle of booze; here with a woman, and so forth. The narrator commenced the video with a bravura the producers must have imagined fitting for the masculine writer. “Hemingway,” he announced, “Fighter. Hunter. Fisherman. Drinker. Lover.” I must admit, it sounded promising to me at the time. But from the back of the room Junkins…
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Of King’s epics, many fans rate The Stand as the best. Others might point to the haunted house story to end all haunted house stories, The Shining. But for me, Misery—especially in the form of its outstanding William Goldman film adaptation—is his greatest story of all. With Misery, Stephen King plays the game straight up with no chaser. There are no ghosts, no telepathic children, no Randall Flagg on his evil way to town. (*Warning: Spoiler Alerts ahead*) In Misery, there are only two very real seeming people who are pitted against each other. In one corner, there is a romance writer named Paul Sheldon, and in the other is a nurse named Annie Wilkes who is his murder…
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When I was in college, I lived in a house with five other girls. Next door to us lived six more boys. Behind us lived my roommate’s boyfriend and his five roommates, and across the parking lot we all shared lived my boyfriend and his five roommates. Then, in a small house bumping up against the corner of the parking lot, were locals: a slight, older man, his wife, and a pack of chickens who wandered among our houses and escorted us to our doorsteps. Our lives were messy and intertwined, even with the man and his chickens, but also glorious, defined by the rare kind of effortless intimacy that can only be temporary, unable to sustain itself for too long without splintering…
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___________________________________ The Life and Crimes of Jennifer Mee ___________________________________ The whole thing seemed kind of silly if you didn’t look too closely. Here was a girl, on national TV, who couldn’t stop hiccupping! Her hiccups were short and high-pitched. It was kinda cute, right? She was only fifteen. She didn’t come from money. And now she was being flown all over the country to appear on every talk show imaginable; she was being put up in fancy hotels and given expensive manicures. She was experiencing that very specific sliver of the American Dream: fifteen minutes of fame. Andy Warhol was the one who came up with that fifteen minutes of fa…
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Son of a bitch! Lynch leaned back in his chair after he slipped his phone back in his jacket pocket. He should have known better than to trust Chodan. He’d been fighting for years in these mountains to lure his brother back to his village and away from Beijing’s influence. Now that he could see how close Lynch was to negotiating a settlement where he’d failed, he wasn’t about to let him leave. Chodan might not have lied, but he wouldn’t have balked at turning away and presenting a more pleasant view of Kendra’s situation if it was more comfortable for him. Which left Lynch not knowing what the hell was happening with Kendra, but realizing it wasn’t good. He’d been luck…
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How’d you get like this? * One night, I’m talking to my three older siblings—Linda, Karen, and Lee—about our proximity to heinous crimes and mysterious deaths over the years. We talk about our neighbors in Oakland who plunged to their death off an icy mountain road on Thanksgiving, 1972. Husband, wife, two children, a lone surviving son. A tragedy. Forty-nine years ago now. They’re buried across from our grandparents in a Jewish cemetery in Portland. Whenever I’m up there, I leave a stone on their graves, though I have no memory of them, just a memory of the story. “Mom said it was a mob hit or a murder-suicide,” Karen says and we all sort of agree: That was a thing Mo…
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“Conspiracies are melodramatic, my dear, especially when they’re made by rich people with too much money and time on their hands.”—The Smiler with the Knife, Nicholas Blake * Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in July 1939 with a Mephistophelean beard and a clutch of potential projects. The facial hair was an artifact of Five Kings, a wildly ambitious synthesis of Shakespeare plays that had closed in Philadelphia. John Houseman, then Welles’s producing partner, wrote that “as a final token of defiance, Orson announced that he was retaining his beard and would not shave it off until he had appeared as Falstaff on a New York stage.” The affectation provided additional ammu…
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Jane Harper’s authorial-origin story is both the stuff of a lifelong dream-come-true, and the outcome of professional focus, preparation, and planning. The seeming overnight international success of her debut novel The Dry, belies a keen backstory of Harper channelling her creativity via a highly pragmatic approach, the same combined effort with which she now plots her tightly-woven mysteries. Even as a full-time business reporter, Harper knew she had a book she wanted to write, squeezing in fiction writing time before and after her journalism workday. In 2014, she pursued an online writing course, and, the following year, won the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Literar…
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My first novel gave me my breakthrough in Germany as an author of psychological thrillers. It was also a type of self-therapy, and all without my knowing it. When I gave my good friend Thomas the first draft to read, his eyes opened wide at me and he said, “You’re essentially describing exactly what we experienced with Paul.” That experience I had with my best friend and mentor back then was probably the decisive factor in my becoming interested in the mysteries of the human soul. I wouldn’t be an author today without it. Due to our big age difference, Paul was like a second father to me. Unfortunately, Paul was very sick. It wasn’t like cancer eating away at you on the …
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Pontoons crashed across ocean swells. The Kokomo Cat II cut a straight bearing toward something in the distance: a single triangular orange marker amid whitecaps over the shallows. A handful of other boats were already scattered above the reef, attached to mooring buoys installed by the preservation authorities to prevent anchor damage. Conversation among the divers quieted, a counterpoint to the boat’s hull loudly smashing up and down on the waves, shooting water over the railings. Many of the passengers—especially first-time visitors—watched over the side as the sea went by, getting naturally stoned on the Keys phenomenon of the rapidly changing palette of vibrant col…
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Where it All Began
